Methodology & boundaries
How the Stabletown Diagnostic works
Start with the economic outcome, not a product label. The Diagnostic organizes the inputs that determine whether a place is ready to launch a local program or needs a separate community-finance readiness process.
1. Outcome first
The Diagnostic begins with what the community is trying to accomplish: increase local spending, fund a targeted incentive or benefit, activate a district or cohort, or organize a project and its capital path. Most local-program objectives route into Stabletown's local-commerce deployment model. Project-finance objectives branch into a distinct readiness review because the stakeholders, records, and regulated execution requirements are different.
2. Readiness, not a black-box score
The output is a deterministic planning judgment based on visible inputs. For local-commerce programs, that includes the funder or sponsor, operating owner, merchant network, approval path, intended behavior, and evidence the program must produce. For community-finance work, it includes project definition, stage, capital-stack inputs, workflow friction, and the presence of qualified execution partners.
3. What the Stabletown layer records
Stabletown can maintain application-level records about programs, participants, merchants, eligibility, rules, reward or value attribution, transactions or redemptions, approvals, workflow events, and outcomes. That canonical application evidence is not the same thing as holding money, maintaining a bank account, issuing a stablecoin, or serving as the official securities registry for a municipal offering.
4. Rails are implementation choices
A deployment may use card, bank, wallet, QR, voucher, stable-value, blockchain, or other infrastructure depending on the program. Those rails do not define Stabletown. Stabletown's role is the programmable network and operating layer above them: configuring who participates, what rules apply, how activity is interpreted, and what evidence the institution receives.
5. Where regulated execution happens
Stabletown does not become a bank, custodian, money transmitter, municipal advisor, broker-dealer, underwriter, exchange, transfer agent, trustee, or law firm merely because its software coordinates a program or financing workflow. When a use case requires those roles, execution stays with the qualified institutions and professionals responsible for them.
6. What the Diagnostic is not
It is not a forecast, quote, offer, solicitation, securities analysis, municipal-advisory service, underwriting service, custody service, banking service, tax opinion, or legal advice. Sample figures and recommendations are illustrative planning assumptions, not official estimates, and may vary materially by community, program design, project, implementation rail, and jurisdiction.
Operating principle
Rent the rails. Own the network.
The Diagnostic is designed around the layer Stabletown intends to make reusable: relationships among institutions, sponsors, merchants, participants, programs, rules, projects, transactions, and outcomes. A successful first deployment should make the next local economic program easier to launch.